Final bid phase. BAFO. Best and Final Offer. Beautiful name, by the way. And my favourite thing ever… It’s not just that people show their faces under their masks… It sounds clean. Professional. Almost elegant. Like everyone is now putting their best offer on the table, shaking hands mentally, and preparing for a fair final comparison. Cute. Then a few smart guys decided to be very smart. Too smart. They started sneaking small changes into the agreement. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that looked...
about 19 hours ago • 1 min read
Dakar–Diamniadio. A toll road. It reduced a journey of around 90 minutes to approximately 25. It opened on time. Within budget. Traffic exceeded expectations. And it became one of Africa’s best-known PPP case studies. So, naturally, “experts” looked at the contract. The financing. The risk allocation. The concessionaire. All important. But many were missing the secret sauce. Senegal spent around ten years preparing the project before the road opened. Ten years. Not ten PowerPoint...
1 day ago • 2 min read
I have a friend. A colleague. She is very interested in putting her knowledge to work. On her own. In the consulting space. I always tell her that selling air conditioners probably has a much better future. You know. Climate change. Installation fees. Recurring maintenance revenue. All that. But she loves infrastructure. Let her be. She wanted to know how to create a service for a particular government agency. My answer was simple. Ask them what they need. Do not spend three months creating a...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Governments love plans. Ten-year plans. Twenty-year plans. In NZ, we are bold and we have now even a thirty-year plans. A great recollection of projects, without a vision. But still… Beautiful documents. Pipelines. Strategies. Dashboards. Digital systems. All useful. They normally forget one small thing… Very small… Almost invisible… Someone still needs to do the work. That’s it. Someone needs to understand the information. Challenge the assumptions. Structure the project. Run the...
3 days ago • 1 min read
You don’t need to be loud to be powerful. But you do need to stop hiding behind safe opinions. Mainstream opinions. Collaboration. Governance. Value for money. Quality. Those words per se mean nothing. They have been used so much that they have become empty. Give me an example. Be specific. What exactly do you mean? Give me your definition. If you believe something deeply, say it. Stand by it. Own it. And own the reaction too. The people who matter won’t always agree with you. But they will...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Not the usual story about engineering genius. When George Washington Goethals took control of the project in 1907, he inherited something close to a nightmare. The French attempt had collapsed. Two American chief engineers had already left. The workforce was enormous, multinational and frustrated. People lived and worked in brutal conditions, with disease, landslides, accidents, racial discrimination and constant labour disputes surrounding the project. Goethals was a military engineer. You...
5 days ago • 1 min read
This weekend, I went to a mall. At a weird hour. But this is what you need to do to keep the kids busy. Food court. People wearing trousers two sizes bigger than necessary… Not even Lululemon, by the way. Queueing for 15 minutes at McDonald’s. The intense smell of fries and KFC… I got it very quickly. I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here. When was the last time you felt that way? Knowing you could be somewhere else, but instead you had just walked into another room smelling of...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Politics is a pain in the a$$. But you can hardly avoid it. It is hard to be brave all the time. It is hard to tell every person throwing bullsh*t into the room that they are wrong. It is also tiring. And sometimes, it can backfire. Badly. It can put you in a difficult position. And it can put the people behind you in a difficult position too. So yes. Sometimes, at high tables, you need to swallow. You need to let something pass… Let them, as Mel Robbins would say. You need to smile when you...
7 days ago • 1 min read
A few days ago, Monge Malo, the best sales trainer in Spanish language talked about The Abilene Parados. The Abilene Paradox happens when a group of people does something nobody actually wants to do because everyone assumes the others want it. Like Christmas dinners. Or most corporate meetings. Twelve adults in a room. Nobody agrees. Nobody believes the plan. Nobody thinks the process makes sense. But everyone nods. The junior person thinks the senior people know better. The senior person...
8 days ago • 1 min read